Contents

About

Gab, which advertises itself as a free speech alternative to Twitter, was created by Andrew Torba. The social site was launched on and is still in early beta. [1]

Website History

Gab was created in August 2016 as an alternative to the popular social network Twitter. Founder and CEO Andrew Torba cited "the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly" as part of the inspiration for Gab, which he created "after reading reports that Facebook employees suppress conservative articles". Torba said in November that the site's user base had expanded significantly following censorship controversies involving major social media companies, including the permanent suspensions from Twitter of several prominent alt-right accounts.

In December 2016, Gab.ai's submission of its app to the iOS App Store was declined by Apple. Apple cited pornographic content as the reason. At the same time, Twitter also cut off access to its API without specifying a reason. A resubmitted version of the app which blocked pornography by default was also rejected for violating Apple's rules on hate speech.

After 9 months of closed beta testing, as of May 2017 the site is open to anyone registering with an email.

On July 22, 2017, the site added Pro accounts and on August 1, 2017, Gab TV was opened up to Pro members. It was described as a service for creating Periscope-like video streaming channels. According to Andrew Torba, the site was hit with a DDoS attack soon afterwards.

On August 17, 2017, Google removed Gab's app from the Google Play Store for violating its policy against hate speech. Google stated that the app did not "demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people." In September 2017, Gab filed an antitrust suit against Google for their removal of the Gab app from the Google Play Store but dropped the suit on October 22, 2017.

In September of 2017, Gab faced pressure from its domain registrar to take down a post by Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin. Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation commented that this pressure was part of an increase in politically motivated domain name seizures.

Mascot

Gabby, the frog, was drawn from anteduiluvian and Biblical sources. Mainly the plague of frogs (Exodus 8:2-7), the frog serves as a metaphor for the site "releasing the frogs" on Silicon Valley to expose their corruption, censorship, collusion, and monopoly on the web. [2]